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Sunday, August 28, 2011

Troops Photograph Every Arlington Grave

There was an article in Time on Friday regarding Arlington Cemetery. It describes the huge effort by the Army to photograph every marker in Arlington Cemetery. By huge, it took 60 soldiers every night for three months to accomplish the task of photographing more than 219,000 graves and 43,000 sets of remain in the columbarium.

The Army will be using the photos to create a digital map of the cemetery. This project is part of the records cleanup mandated by Congress. It was acknowledged last year that there was mismanagement of records including mismarked and unmarked graves at the cemetery. It is possible that the photos taken this summer will eventually be included in an online database for the public.